I Ching
The I Ching (易經, in pinyin Yì Jīng, "Book of Changes") is a divinatory and philosophical text from ancient China. Its oldest layers date back to the Western Zhou dynasty (around 1000 BC), making it the longest continuously used oracle in the known world.
Structure and history
The I Ching describes 64 hexagrams — figures of six lines, where each line can be solid (yang, ⚊) or broken (yin, ⚋). Each hexagram has a name (e.g., "The Creative", "The Receptive", "Difficulty at the Beginning"), a judgment, an image, and six line texts that apply when a line is changing.
The core of the text — the Zhouyi — is attributed to King Wen and the Duke of Zhou (11th century BC, though authorship is legendary). The "Ten Wings" — later philosophical commentaries — date from the 5th to 3rd centuries BC, traditionally attributed to Confucius.
The consultation
Originally, a hexagram was generated by manipulating 50 yarrow stalks in a long meditative ritual sequence. From the 10th century onwards, the three-coin method became popular: toss three coins six times to define each line. Heads = 3, tails = 2. Totals 6 and 9 indicate changing lines (creating a transformed second hexagram).
Richard Wilhelm translation
The most influential translation for the West is by Richard Wilhelm, German missionary and Sinologist, published in 1923. The English version — by Cary F. Baynes from Wilhelm's German — appeared in 1950 with a preface by Carl Jung, who described the I Ching as the perfect example of synchronicity.